Stem Cells and Cancer: The Molecular Mechanisms of Cancer Stemness
A special issue of Life (ISSN 2075-1729). This special issue belongs to the section "Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2021) | Viewed by 4903
Special Issue Editors
Interests: functional genomics; functional proteomics; genetic interactions; signal transduction; system biology; cancer biology; cancer stemness
Interests: cancer biology; targeted cancer therapy; cell stress response; gene therapy; cancer genetics; pediatric cancer; cancer immunotherapy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
If a cancerous tumor is a tissue, it should have its own stem cells. The idea that cancer can originate from stem cells dates back to the mid-19th century, when father pathologists observed malignant cancer tissue under the microscope and noticed the similarity between cancer and embryonic tissues. They suggested that cancers arise from embryonic cells. This concept was later formalized by Julius Cohnheim when he published his “embryonal rest” theory in 1875. The theory stated that embryonic remains from developmental stages lie dormant in the adult tissues but could be activated to form cancer. More than 120 years after the introduction of embryonal rest theory, Dominique Bonnet and John Dick at the University of Toronto confirmed that leukemia cells originated from a small subpopulation (less than 1 in 10,000) of hematopoietic stem cells. Since this discovery, so far, cancer stem cells (CSC) have been identified in several solid tumors including brain, breast, ovary, colon, lung, kidney, pancreas, melanoma, prostate, gastric, head and neck and non-melanoma skin cancers. CSCs are defined as a small subset of cells within a tumor that share many behaviors and features of both cancer and normal stem cells, including pluripotency, self-renewal, slow growth and the ability to differentiate to multiple tumor cells. CSCs are known to be responsible for cancer metastasis, therapy resistance and relapse since they can survive anti-cancer therapies and generate new tumors. Although the existence and origins of CSCs are still under debate, some believe that targeting CSCs is the key to cancer therapy.
In this Special Issue of Life, we invite researchers to share with us new insights into the molecular and cellular mechanism of stemness in cancer and to improve our understanding of CSC biology.
Dr. Babak Nami
Dr. Hamid Maadi
Dr. Maryam Hejazi
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- cancer stem cell
- tumor-initiating cell
- tumor heterogeneity and plasticity
- signaling pathway
- epithelial–mesenchymal transition
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